Opportunity Favors the Prepared Mind - by Deborah Windell

The thought of making soap first came to my mind when I lived in South Carolina. I was a single mom living in a small town, working as a social worker for next to nothing in a very difficult job, and I was casting about for a cottage industry that I could do to make ends meet. But it was hard to find information about soapmaking at the public library, and what I could find made the process seem too intimidating and complicated. So I put aside my thoughts of soapmaking and made wedding cakes instead -- pretty successfully, at that.

A couple of years later, my son and I moved to Portland, Oregon, so that I could take a better-paying job. And not long after I got here one of my neighbors invited a few women in our little neighborhood over to her home -- to make soap! I leaped at the chance. Four of us trooped over to her home in the Portland rain one evening in early winter. She told us about soapmaking and her history with it, and we took turns stirring a huge pot of warm vegetable oils, water and lye for hours while we talked, as women do, about our lives and watched for the elusive trace. Then we divided up the batter and personalized our soaps. I was in heaven.

I made two varieties in shoe boxes that I'd lined with trash bags. The heavenly aromas of the citrus oils I'd bought to scent them promptly vanished when added to the raw soap. I clumsily put in far more liquid colorant than they needed so they were garishly bright. I bundled them up and carried them home. And against advice, I uncovered them at least 50 times during the next 18 hours while I watched the clock impatiently, so they were blanketed with thick soda ash by the time I could wait no longer and turned them out to cut. Long story short: I wasn't scared anymore -- I was hooked!

It's been a scant two years since that first soapmaking experience, but I haven't gone more than two weeks since that evening without making soap at least once -- more often it was a batch or two during the week after work and several more on the weekends, all the while reading, asking questions, experimenting, learning. Now it's several batches a day, five days a week. (The other two days I'm at the Portland Saturday Market, selling soaps.) I'm still reading, and asking questions, and experimenting. I'm still learning....

Opportunity number one: Catherine Failor, soapmaker extraordinaire, founder/owner of Milky Way Molds and author of several books on soapmaking, is my neighbor who started me down this path that rainy winter evening. She has been and is my friend and mentor, and my gratitude to her is enormous.

Savonerie, my business, was a part-time job for me until January of 2003 -- I was working until then at a very demanding full-time job too, leading a community-based treatment team for severely mentally ill folks and making soap in the evenings and on weekends as a creative "antidote" and part-time business. But my husband and I, public servants both, got laid off within three months of one another as our jobs were lost during sweeping layoffs in our state's financial meltdown. So now we're both doing this full-time -- to the tune of about 60 hours a week each. Phillip does the bookkeeping, has established tracking systems for inventory and supplies and orders, does the wrapping and the packing, shipping and invoicing. He's also an accomplished photographer and has taken all the photos for our website and printed materials. I'm the art department, manufacturing department, marketing director and public relations department, and ultimately the main decision-maker about the business. It's a good division of labor and I'm very fortunate in it, because I would not be able to do all this by myself.

As my soapmaking moved beyond the limits of "hobby" to business, I started out, as most soapmakers do, supporting my "habit" by selling to friends and coworkers, then through local shops on consignment. I would go through the phone book and call store owners and ask them for a few minutes of time. Then I would carry a small galvanized washtub full of soaps into the shops for them to see. Most of them gasped with surprise when they saw the soaps, and then said yes -- the soaps sold themselves without too much assistance from me, fortunately, as I had NO sales experience. I developed a brochure and started a website. I moved from consignment to wholesale accounts. Savonerie quickly grew, and just as quickly I reached the point that I had time either to make soap, or to sell soap ... but not both. Then last April I got an opportunity to contract with a marketing firm in Seattle that has a showroom in the Seattle Gift Center and reps in four states. Now Savonerie has accounts with regional gift, "urban gardening" and healthy lifestyle businesses and is supporting itself after only six months. And in June, Nordstrom (which is headquartered in Seattle) started carrying my soaps in their spas across the country, and has given us feedback that they're doing well there! As you can imagine I nearly fell off my chair when THAT came rolling out of the fax machine!

Opportunity number two: The relationship with the marketing firm came about through a cousin of my husband to whom we had given a gift of (what else?) soap. He liked the soap very much, and encouraged us to call the CEO of this company, who was an old friend of his from back in their own "starving-artist" days. I gathered up my nerve and followed up on his recommendation. The contract that resulted from that call and subsequent visit to show him the soaps has flourished.

The most challenging thing for us to deal with, I believe, has been the tension between needing to grow the business really fast (I don't want us to lose our home, and unemployment benefits won't last much longer) and needing to NOT grow it TOO fast and have it outstrip our ability to keep up and maintain our standards. My spouse and I are good planners, and as it turns out I'm a good soapmaker. But it's very, very hard to have so much riding on this, and we're not exactly young. Early on, right after I was laid off, it was rather difficult for me to be polite when well-meaning people would tell me that being in this position was probably a blessing and all for the best. It's still too great a stretch to consider it a blessing -- the stakes are very high, and I feel terrible when I see the costs to the people I used to treat who can't get services now. But I am VERY glad to have this chance, however risky, to do something that I love that sustains, not drains me.

Opportunity number three: Losing our jobs? No, I don't think so. Both my husband and I were dedicated public servants, very invested in our work. And for our family, this is a huge, scary step-by-step journey into a future I can't see clearly and have to take on faith. I still don't know for certain just how far down the bottom might be. But if it's not an opportunity, it's still a future full of chances and possibilites as well as looming shadows. And in the words of Louis Pasteur, "Chance favors the prepared mind." We're doing our determined best to prepare this business for success.

There are still many hurdles to get over, most of them instrumental. We don't have much discretionary income, so we are having to seek outside funding resources if Savonerie is to survive and thrive -- not an easy thing these days. I'm working in a dedicated studio space, but it's far too small for what I need to do. And as our business has grown, we've had to seek other alternatives for packaging (we don't have time now to wrap each bar in the way we'd done before our business began to take off) and for work space as our home has filled up with soap from stem to stern. On the other hand, we've made it to the point that the business is paying for itself without borrowing, and we're working with the Small Business Administration for a loan so that it can grow. Late last spring I began a slow search for a custom soap box manufacturer, finally moving ahead just last month with a manufacturer here in Portland. Taking into account the time-honored equation, "Time = Money," this will actually be a net savings for us now that our orders are large enough support manufacturing our boxes in quantity. And lo and behold! when I drove out to meet with the box manufacturer, there was a "For Lease" sign on the fence outside the building. I inquired about the property the minute the box transaction was completed, and by the next morning I had made an agreement to lease some unused warehouse space in their factory that is ideal for my little savonnerie. Now I have enough space to keep up with production orders without having to shuffle and rearrange everything daily, and I can begin purchasing and storing supplies in the large quantities that will cut my costs in terms of both time and money. And that's a good thing because we need to put every extra penny we can find into capitalizing this business!

Opportunity number four: in making a decision to keep my business as local as possible to support our struggling Oregon economy (even though it was not the lowest bid for the boxes) I found a light industrial space available at a fraction of market rate that is ideal for my needs to expand. It will be a net savings, even with the box cost, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Serendipity happens to us all. Opportunities offer themselves, probably a lot more frequently than most of us realize, and our challenge is to be alert for them and prepared to grab them as they go flying past. So here's my little homily of hope and encouragement: Know yourself and your product and be true to your vision. Examine it just as a gemologist does an uncut jewel. Look courageously at all its beauty and flaws. Listen, observe and learn whenever and however and from whomever you can. Prepare yourself for your own success, emotionally and materially: don't hold back if you want to go forward! Create the best product you can that fulfills your vision, and create the things you need to support your product: printed materials, record-keeping systems, packaging that works for you and enhances your product, a web presence if you want one. Prepare for your coming opportunities as well as you possibly can. Savonerie has flourished in large part because we had already developed and refined our skills and our product...and were ready with printed materials, attractive packaging worked out, and a business plan and structure in place when those opportunities came.

Growth, whether business or personal, also takes belief in yourself and in what you are doing, and the courage to take that belief and push it further than you can see. In little enough time you will come, as we all do, to a place that urges you to step off familiar ground into the unknown without knowing where you will land, and that can be scary -- but exciting too. Mariners in the "age of discovery" followed their maps to the edge of the known world, then sailed beyond the edge into those regions marked "here there be dragons" to discover new lands. So get ready. Prepare for taking that step as best you can. Get yourself and your product and your structure ready, watch for that moment of opportunity to come along -- and leap.